Since mid August, I have been crisscrossing the country with my vintage typewriter, inviting people to share their messages for the next president through my performance project “I Wish to Say.” Dressed as a 1960s secretary, I aim to create an intimate space where citizens can voice their hopes, concerns, and aspirations for the nation’s future.
My collection presents a selection of messages typed during my 2024 fall tour, which has taken me from Pennsylvania to Florida, with stops in New York City, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, and more. People of all ages, backgrounds, and beliefs – students, retirees, business owners, teachers – have shared their thoughts with me. Using carbon paper, I create two copies of each message – one sent to the White House, the other preserved in my growing archive of over 4,500 postcards.
My tour will continue through the presidential inauguration and the administration’s first 100 days, with upcoming performances at Scripps College near Los Angeles and Hunter College in New York. I believe that the act of dictating to a stranger forces people to distill their thoughts. It also challenges people to articulate their deepest concerns with clarity and power.
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“When you look at the 2020 margin of victory, you see that Arizona was won by 10,457 votes, and in Arizona alone, since 2020, we have 62,000 newly naturalized voters — these are folks who decided to go for it and to become a citizen,” said Nicole Melaku, executive director of the National Partnership for New Americans. “Of course, that electorate is going to have a decisive factor on the outcome of the Electoral College in Arizona. Nevada was won by 33,596 votes. There’s a new American naturalized population of 41,360 people.
“Without having to slice and dice the map, one can ascertain that these voting blocks of new people are within the margin of victory in some of these places.”
After 60 years in the US, a 78-year-old immigrant is voting for the first time. AP video
Nationally, one eligible voter in 10 is a naturalized citizen, according to the Pew Research Center. New York State boasts 2.7 million foreign-born eligible voters, roughly 19% of the population. There are around 2.5 million Black naturalized citizens nationally.
How can new Americans be encouraged to get more civically engaged? Melaku said that early engagement can help, pointing to advocacy organizations registering people to vote during their naturalization oath ceremonies.
Here in New York City, language materials play a key role, given the city’s diversity. Perry Grossman, director of the NYCLU’s Voting Rights Project, cited recent local efforts to expand language-access beyond the national expectation, including the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act of New York.
“We publish materials in a lot of different languages and do what we can to get it out there,” Grossman said. “There are translation services available, because we certainly have just a ton of language diversity here in New York City, but again, new Americans, by definition, are typically just getting introduced to the political infrastructure of our city [and] of our country, and so it takes a lot of contact and a lot of work to make sure that they’re being successfully incorporated into the electorate.”
“By providing election assistance in someone’s first language, you’re really making them feel welcome in the political process,” said Grossman. “It’s not that ‘you’re a foreigner who’s privileged to participate,’ but rather that ‘you are someone who we anticipate and encourage and expect to participate in the political process’ — language systems [are] really important on that score.
“When it comes to [people in] places or communities with smaller diasporas [and] less widely spoken languages, they can feel a lot more challenging. There are simply not enough official channels to target all those groups, particularly given the real breadth of language diversity in New York City.”
Political participation and socioeconomic status are famously intertwined and new Americans are no exception.
“Naturalization over the last decade has become increasingly more expensive for a variety of reasons,” said Melaku. “USCIS [U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service] is a self-funded agency that basically funds itself through the collection of fees, and that leaves the working poor out of a lot of the conversation — we have low-income communities for which [a] $785-plus legal consultation would be a considerable chunk of a weekly budget or monthly budget.
“One of the things that we advocate for is to keep the cost of citizenship affordable and accessible to low-income communities. That’s one barrier people face: the cost.” Tandy Lau is a Report for America corps member who writes about public safety for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep him writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visitinghttps://bit.ly/amnews1.
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On the night before Election Day, at campaign events across the country, celebrities including Oprah Winfrey, Lady Gaga and Jon Bon Jovi turned out in force for Kamala Harris’ presidential bid.
The battleground state of Pennsylvania was particularly starry: In Pittsburgh, the vice president’s rally featured Cedric the Entertainer, Katy Perry and Andra Day. In Philadelphia, the finale of Harris’ daylong dash across Pennsylvania, performers and presenters included DJ Cassidy, Fat Joe and Ricky Martin, while Gaga sang a soulful “God Bless America” and Winfrey brought first-time voters to the stage.
Republican Donald Trump was decidedly unimpressed with Harris’ celebrity lineup. At his own rally in Pittsburgh, which overlapped with Harris’ event in the city, the former president criticized Harris for one celebrity endorsement in particular: Beyoncé. He spoke dismissively about Beyoncé’s appearance at a Harris rally with Harris in Houston last month, drawing boos for the megastar from his supporters.
“Beyoncé would come in. Everyone’s expecting a couple of songs. There were no songs. There was no happiness,” Trump said.
Beyoncé did not perform at the event but was joined onstage by her Destiny’s Child bandmate Kelly Rowland, and gave a joyful, impassioned speech met with cheers.
Previously, Beyoncé allowed the Harris campaign to take on her 2016 track “Freedom,” a cut from her landmark 2016 album “Lemonade,” as its anthem.
Trump added that Harris should have learned a lesson from Hillary Clinton and had Beyoncé speak after her, saying, “That way the people stay.”
In 2016, Beyoncé performed at a campaign event for Democratic nominee Clinton in Cleveland in the days leading up to the election.
“They booed like hell, but the press didn’t play that,” Trump continued in his description of Beyoncé’s appearance at the Harris event.
He insisted his campaign doesn’t need celebrities to pack in a crowd, adding: “We don’t need a star because we have policy. We have great policy.”
At another point in the same rally, though, he enthused: “So many celebrities here, it’s incredible: Mike Pompeo, please stand up,” introducing his former secretary of state. Trump also was joined by Megyn Kelly and baseball star Roberto Clemente’s son.
Harris lined up performers to speak and play at campaign rallies in all seven battleground states on Monday, and melded them all into one Democratic get-out-the-vote livestream.
In Las Vegas, performers included Christina Aguilera and electro-dance duo Sofi Tukker. In Raleigh, North Carolina, Sugarland, the country music duo of Jennifer Nettles and Kristian Bush, took the stage.
In Detroit, performers included Jon Bon Jovi, who sang a quiet acoustic version of his band’s working-class anthem “Livin’ on a Prayer.”
If mental health is wealth, then this election will require dipping into your savings. Brett Ford, associate professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, likens politics to a form of chronic stress and Nov. 5 marks yet another high-stakes presidential election with ex-president Donald Trump on the ballot.
“Chronic stress involves long lasting, pervasive conditions that typically evoke negative emotions and feelings of distress,” said Ford. “Definitionally, that sounds a lot like day-to-day politics to me for many people. And one of the useful things about viewing politics through the lens of chronic stress is that people have been researching chronic stress for a while. We can take some of the things that we’ve learned about chronic stress and bring it into the realm of political chronic stress.”
“We’ve learned that politics regularly evokes negative emotions for people regardless of your political ideology or party. We know that the more intensely negative you feel about politics, just [on] a day-to-day basis [and] not even in the lead up to an election, the worse your mental health [and] the more physical health symptoms you feel.”
Ford’s recent research, published in an American Psychological Association Journal, observed voters across parties and noted how personal politics felt to them. She says there are consistent patterns showing election-related stress hitting younger and more liberal people harder. And the study found associations between politics and daily life ranging from financial livelihood to moral convictions.
While Ford’s findings could not confirm racial and gender identity as factoring into increased political stress, she says discussions about racial and gender discrimination can often feel political and can lead to chronic stress-like tension. And unlike other stress factors, politics is so broad and far reaching that it cannot be resolved alone even by the most ambitious individuals.
Robert Klitzman, professor of psychiatry and sociomedical sciences at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, says there remain distinctions between political stress and chronic stress. After all, the tangible feeling can be quite valid.
“A lot of people are feeling stress in the past few days, weeks [and] months, because of the upcoming election,” said Klitzman. “And it’s different from chronic stress which is always going on, and part of it is because the stress here is, in some ways, an existential threat. It’s a threat to many of our lives, depending on [how] the election goes. It’s threats to our democracy, and it’s a feeling [of] not being able necessarily to control the outcome that’s leading a lot of people to feel a great amount of angst and distress.”
In practice, fear and anxiety uniquely stem from this presidential election according to observations by Dilice Robertson, a clinical associate professor at the NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing. And the impacts certainly single out nonwhite people.
“If we talk about social determinants of health, all of this combines into this storm of negative outcomes for people of color,” said Robertson. “There’s been this target on people of color, especially in New York [with] social media [and] ads being utilized. Conversations among lay people are being utilized to continue to perpetuate this misinformation, to sway people in direction of who to vote for.
“The problem is in this prioritization of people of color, they’re not identifying what the potential outcomes are going to be when the decision is made to vote for one candidate or the other.”
Yet Robertson believes the root causes for such anxieties did not start with Trump in 2016. Getting called an anti-Black slur when she arrived in America decades ago informed on how endemic these issues really are.
Political stress can also compound existing mental health conditions, says Klitzman.
“If one is depressed to start, one may … focus even more on the negative potential outcomes,” he said. “Of course, we don’t know what’s going to happen in the election. And my guess is, even after Election Day, there may be quite a bit of uncertainty for several days … similarly, anxiety can spiral.
“And so if you’re feeling anxious to begin with … this anxiety could feed into that anxiety about the election, that is about the future [of] the country, and about worries about ways that might affect one’s own life. And those anxieties can perpetuate each other. They can become mutually reinforcing in a negative way.”
So how can people chill out about politics without downplaying their importance? The experts all suggest cutting down on social media intake, and being picky on what does get through the filter.
Less politically-engaged people experience less election-related stress according to Ford. But she fears prioritizing mental health can seem at odds with the foundations of democracy, like civic participation and social action. Ford and Robertson both believe acceptance can reduce election-related stress without compromising political engagement.
“We use the term radical acceptance sometimes, where you can only be responsible for what you can do,” said Robertson. “If you are able to exercise that civic duty and vote, be comfortable in knowing that you contributed, and then whatever is outside of your locus of control being OK with the outcome, because you cannot change anything about that.
“Radical acceptance looks like [no matter the] result, that you have the responsibility of how you will manage yourself and the people who are closest to you in your household and your family. And so radical acceptance [means] you did what you could. You are responsible for that, and that is it.”
Yet Ford also believes reframing the gravity of elections to work toward a better future not only increases civic engagement, but also predicts better mental health outcomes. People feel better without dismissing veritable political concerns by fostering “socially-oriented positive emotions” like compassion and inspiration.
“Those are also really powerful motivators of action that don’t require us to make this situation feel less severe in our head,” said Ford. “It can be that, and it can also be an opportunity to come together, to take action, to build community, [and] to engage in compassionate, ethical ways toward each other.
“And to me, that is a really promising pathway forward. It doesn’t require us to take away our anxiety, which is really motivating.” Tandy Lau is a Report for America corps member who writes about public safety for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep him writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visitinghttps://bit.ly/amnews1.
The Associated Press (AP), a global news cooperative, has been making the official call on who wins U.S. presidential elections since 1848.
On Election Day, this year on Nov. 5, the AP tabulates thousands of elections at the same time, including state legislature races, congressional races, the presidential race, and ballot measures to a variety of local offices in all 50 states.
“We will declare winners in 5,000 contested races across the country without fear or favor, just based on the facts,” AP Executive Editor Julie Pace wrote in a column. “While we strive to report the results as quickly as possible, our primary focus is to get it right — no matter how long it may take.”
Explaining Election Day: How AP declares winners
The AP was founded in New York City, where it’s still headquartered, in 1846. Moses Yale Beach, the publisher of a now defunct newspaper called the New York Sun, convinced four other city newspaper publishers to fund a “pony express route” through Montgomery, Alabama to bring news of the Mexican American War to their readers faster than the post office. The news would be carried from horseback to stagecoach to telegraph before finally reaching New York.
The pony express eventually became the AP. In 1848, the AP called the presidential election for Zachary Taylor, the 12th U.S. president. The organization went on to pioneer a firm nonpartisan stance as they became a “quasi-official recorder of election results nationwide.” Today, the AP operates 248 bureaus in 99 countries.
“Since the dawn of the republic, elections in the U.S. have been administered at the state and local levels; there is no federal body that counts the vote or shares results. This is why the AP stepped in to fill that void shortly after our founding in 1846 — to independently deliver election results to the world,” wrote Pace. “We play a crucial role in the American democratic process. We’ve carried out this responsibility through world wars and pandemics, political and social unrest. No organization has been calling elections longer than the AP.”
Elections will usually be called well before 100% of the votes have been counted on election night at the close of the polls. These results are unofficial mostly because absentee and mail-in ballots aren’t counted until after Election Day, a common occurrence that’s come under scrutiny in recent years.
An old AP teletype machine on display at the University of Richmond. Machines like these used to distribute AP election results before there was an internet or social media. Credit: (Damaso Reyes photo)
The AP uses election data, like voting trends for a particular area or shifting demographics among racial groups, and specific tools like AP VoteCast to determine the “clear winners” in every race they run. They estimate voter turnout in every race and use that to estimate how much of the vote has been counted and how much remains. The AP also tries to determine how ballots counted were cast and the types of votes that remain.
In past elections, more Democrats have voted by mail and more Republicans have voted in-person on Election Day, said the AP. This helps the AP to know if an early lead is expected to shrink or grow after the polls close.
Regardless of the Herculean undertaking it has taken the AP to count thousands of races accurately for the last almost two centuries, the American voter’s confidence in election results has wavered since 2020. Which underscores years of division along party lines fueled by former President Donald Trump’s campaign lies that the election was stolen.
Their AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found last year that 71% of Democrats, compared to the 22% of Republicans, have confidence that the votes cast in the 2024 presidential election will be counted properly.
Because of this doubt, the AP is “doubling down on its efforts,” said Pace.
“We know it’s not enough to report the results,” wrote Pace. “We need to show our work — be clear about the numbers we’ve crunched, where they came from, and how we’ve ensured their integrity. You have our commitment to being as transparent as possible about our race calling process.”
